And he finally saw the creature that had made the narrow, twisting path.
Chapter Nine
“Fireblast!”
There were two of them, straddling the trail, facing in his direction about a dozen paces away.
Ryan was able to spot a crumbling opening in the dirt to the side, which he imagined had to be their lair. Probably they had been sensitive to the vibrations of his feet as he passed by on his way to the observation tower and had come creeping out to discover what was happening.
They were insects.
But the larger of them was close to two feet in length, the other a couple of inches shorter. Ryan’s first guess had them as some kind of centipede, as they were low to the ground and each had dozens of narrow legs that moved in a strange wavelike motion. Their skins were polished, like green brass, glittering brightly, the scales shifting as they moved nervously from side to side, long antennae quivering above razored jaws.
Ryan had seen similar mutated creatures elsewhere in Deathlands, often in regions that had suffered badly from intensive nuking.
Some of them sometimes squirted blinding or poisonous fluids from glands beneath the throat, and he backed away a few steps, looking for a possible way around them.
But as Ryan glanced sideways, he spotted four more of the hideous, scuttling insects as they emerged dustily from their concealed burrows. And he realized with a thrill of horror that the whole hillside was undermined by the mutie creatures. There could be dozens of them. Or hundreds.
KRYSTY WAS LYING near the water’s edge, dozing in the sudden warm glow of sunshine. Doc was snoring softly to her right. J.B. and Mildred had gone off together about a quarter-hour earlier and vanished into the fringes of the forest. Jak was sitting down on the shingled beach, picking through the rocks until he found perfectly round and smooth stones, which he would flip with a sharp underarm whiplash at the still water, counting the bounces.
“Sixteen!” he said triumphantly.
Krysty sat up suddenly, her head turning toward the invisible top of the hill. “Ryan,” she whispered, then stood and called to the others. “It’s Ryan! He’s in trouble.”
RUN OR FIGHT. When it came down to it, as the Trader used to say, life in Deathlands often left you with a rapid choice of one of those two options.
The morning was flooded with a metallic chittering sound as the insects rubbed their antennae together and clacked their fearsome jaws. Now Ryan could count upward of fifty, creeping forward in their odd sidling motion, surrounding him, though none of them seemed to want to come too close.
He leveled the SIG-Sauer and shot the biggest one, carefully placing the 9 mm round an inch or so behind the turning head. It ripped through the carapace, nearly cutting the thing in two. But its legs continued to move, propelling it slowly toward Ryan.
The others had stopped for a moment at the thunder of the shot, their angular skulls swiveling toward the mortally wounded insect.
“Go get it,” Ryan whispered encouragingly. “Fresh meat for you all.”
A sticky turquoise liquid was seeping from the bullet wound. The powerful handblaster would have stopped a man dead in his tracks, but the insect still seemed to be functioning, ignoring the leaking hole in its body.
He fired quickly, two more shots, taking another couple of the mutie centipedes out of the game, blowing the head clean off the first of them, breaking the body of the second in two. This time some of the others scuttled sinuously toward their stricken comrades and began to devour the twitching, oozing corpses.
But the noise seemed to have stirred up the whole mountain, and Ryan was forced to move before he was trapped by a circle of eighty or more of the creatures.
The only way to move was back up the trail, toward the bare top of the hill. It would buy him a few minutes, but once he got to the wreckage of the watch-tower there would be nowhere else to run.
MILDRED AND J.B. EMERGED from the undergrowth, looking slightly flustered, the woman tugging her jacket on, picking leaf mold from her plaited hair.